D.C. Buzz: Good old, gas-guzzling days

By Dan Freedman

Published
5:20 pm EDT, Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Don Bell, Evironmental Health Director for Norwalk Blooom and Sons, and owners Norm and Jimmy Bloom chat with U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)at the company's Norwalk location in 2016. Murphy co-signed letter asking for inclusion in the Farm Bill now before Congress of wider insurance options for shellfish farmers. less

Don Bell, Evironmental Health Director for Norwalk Blooom and Sons, and owners Norm and Jimmy Bloom chat with U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)at the company's Norwalk location in 2016. Murphy co-signed letter asking for inclusion in the Farm Bill now before Congress of wider insurance options for shellfish farmers. less

Those of you of a certain age and automotive disposition may not remember what your spouse or significant other said to you 20 minutes ago, but you’ll always remember your first car.

Maybe it was a Mustang or Pontiac GTO or a 409 — something about which a classic rock anthem was composed. (Mine was a Toyota Corona, a lemon for which lemonade production was not an option.)

For Sen. Charles Schumer of New York — a lot of N.Y. transplants still consider him their senator — it was a 1971 light blue Plymouth Duster “Slant Six,” a true oldie but goodie.

Schumer was weighing in on the subject of EPA’s plans to roll back the Obama-era fuel-economy standard when he sidetracked onto a wistful memory of his beloved mini-muscle car. It got 6 miles to the gallon but it didn’t matter, Schumer, now 67, recalled, because gas in those days was 23 cents a gallon.

He was on his way back from visiting his then girlfriend, driving on the “Connecticut Turnpike” — that definitely dates him — when an ice truck carrying lobster and other seafood to New York hit him from behind. This was outside Bridgeport, Schumer said.

Afterward, Schumer’s political career took off, from the N.Y. state Assembly to the House of Representatives to the Senate.

But the wrecker took away a burnt twisted-metal portion of his youthful ego that day, on what is now plain-vanilla I-95. As he spoke I could almost hear the Jan & Dean background harmonizing.

Down on the farm

It doesn’t happen often, but it’s always important to report on doings in Washington that affect the day-to-day lives of actual people in Connecticut.

So amid the highs and lows of President Trump’s sit-down with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, the news of efforts to improve the lot of Long Island Sound shellfish farmers likely went unnoticed.

On the same day he was roundly condemning Trump as an “unprepared, weak negotiator,” Sen. Chris Murphy also was co-signing a letter to the Senate Agriculture Committee.

The letter asks for inclusion in the Farm Bill now before Congress of wider insurance options for shellfish farmers. Murphy, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and two others want shellfish farmers to have protections already enjoyed by their land-based counterparts — surf-and-turf parity, you might say.

Shellfish harvesting in Connecticut has come a long way in the past few decades. The salty fishermen with the hard-A accents and rubbery chest-high bibs are not a thing of the past, but they’re certainly not as plentiful as they once were.

In their place in Connecticut are shellfish farmers with aquaculture degrees, cultivating clams and oysters by the bushel. According to Connecticut Department of Agriculture stats, 70,000 acres of shellfish farms are now under cultivation in Connecticut’s coastal waters.

Shellfishing generates $30 million in sales and supports 300 jobs statewide, according to the stats.

Lobsters? Not as much as in the old days, evidently. The decline may be attributable to warming water temperatures, with lobsters off the colder coast of Maine still in abundance.

I am sure I’m not be the only one who misses summertime local lobsters, brought from places like the one astride the Saugatuck at what was then Peter’s Bridge Market in Westport. Sigh!